A peer group piously competitive about suicide, he had concluded, was a very powerful thing, and the West had no equivalent to it. A peer group for whom death was not death—and life was not life, either. Yet an inversion so extreme, he thought, would quickly become decadent: synagogues, nightclubs, nurseries, sunset homes. Transgression, by its nature, was helter-skelter: it had no choice but to escalate. And the thing would start to be over in a generation, as everyone slowly and incredulously intuited it: the core reason.

  Perhaps the closest equivalent, or analogy, the West could field was the firefighters. Muhammad Atta had studied architecture and engineering. The fire that would be created by 20,000 gallons of jet fuel, he knew, could not be fought: the steel frame of the tower would buckle; the walls, which were not intended to be weight-bearing, would collapse, one onto the other; and down it would all come. The fire could not be fought, but there would be firefighters. They were called the “bravest,” accurately, in his view; and, as the bravest, they took on a certain responsibility. The firefighters were saying, every day: “Who’s going to do it, if we don’t? If the bravest don’t, who else is going to risk death to save the lives of strangers?”

  As he sat for another few moments on the tin chair, as he watched the mall awaken and come into commercial being, filling up now with Americans and American purpose and automatic self-belief, he felt he had timed it about right. (And his face had timed it about right.) Because he couldn’t possibly survive another day of the all-inclusive detestation—of the pan-anathema. This feeling had been his familiar since the age of twelve or thirteen; it had come upon him, like an illness without a symptom. Cairo, Hamburg, even the lemon-blue winter dawn over Kandahar: they had all looked the same to him. Unreal mockery.

  Muhammad Atta took the bottle from his carry-on. The imam said it was from Medina. He shrugged, and drank the holy Volvic.

  Boarding began with first class. And if Muhammad Atta ever found anything funny, he might have smiled at this: Wail and Waleed, the brothers, the two semi-literate yokels from the badlands of the Yemeni border, shuffling off to their thrones—2A and 2B. Then business. He led. Abdulaziz and Satam followed.

  He hadn’t even reached his seat when it hit him. It came with great purity of address, replacing everything else in his stretched sensorium. Even his headache, while not actually taking its leave, immediately stepped aside, almost with a flourish, to accommodate the new guest. It was a feeling that had abandoned him forever, he thought, four months ago—but now it was back. With twinkly promptitude, canned music flooded forth: a standard ballad, a flowery flute with many trills and graces. The breathy refrain joined the simmer of the engines; yet neither could drown the popping, the groaning, the creaking, as of a dungeon door to an inner sanctum—the ungainsayable anger of his bowels.

  So now he sat gripping the armrests of 8D as the coach passengers filed by. Why did there have to be so many of them, always another briefcase, another backpack, always another buzzcut, another whitehair?…He waited, rose, and with grueling nonchalance, his buttocks clenched, sauntered forward. All three toilets claimed to be occupied. They were not occupied, he knew. A frequent and inquisitive traveler on American commercial jets, Muhammad Atta knew that the toilets were locked, like all the other toilets (this was the practice on tight turnarounds), and would remain locked until the plane leveled out. He pressed a flat hand against all three: again, the misery of recurrence, of duplication. He tried, but he couldn’t abstain from a brief flurry of shoving and kicking and rattling. As he returned to 8D he saw that Abdulaziz was looking at him, not with commiseration, now, but with puzzled disappointment, even turning in his seat to exchange a responsible frown with Satam.

  Strapped in, Muhammad Atta managed the following series of thoughts. You needed the belief system, the ideology, the ardor. You had to have it. The core reason was good enough for the mind. But it couldn’t carry the body.

  To the others, he realized, he was giving a detailed impersonation of a man who had lost his nerve. And he had not lost his nerve. Even before the plane gave its preliminary jolt (like a polite cough of introduction), he felt the pull of it, with relief, with recognition: the necessary speed, the escape velocity he needed to deliver him to his journey’s end.

  American 11 pushed back from Gate 32, Terminal B, at 7:40. There was the captain and the first officer; there were nine flight attendants, and seventy-six passengers, excluding Wail, Waleed, Satam, Abdulaziz, and Muhammad Atta. American 11 was in the air at 7:59.

  Now he obliged himself to do what he had always intended to do, during the climb. He had a memory ready, and a thought experiment. He wanted to prepare himself for the opening of female flesh; he wanted to prepare himself for what would soon be happening to the throat of the stewardess—whom he could see, on her jump seat, head bowed low, with a pen in her hand and a clipboard on her lap.

  In 1999 his return ticket from Afghanistan had put him on an Iberia flight from the U.A.E. to Madrid. They had just leveled out when he became aware of an altercation in the back of the plane. Swiveling in his seat, he saw that perhaps fifteen or sixteen men, turbaned and white-robed, had crowded into the aisle and were now on the floor, humped in prayer. You could hear the male flight attendant’s monotonous and defeated remonstrations as he backed away. “Por favor, señores. Es ilegal. Señores, por favor!” Minutes later the captain came on the PA, saying in Spanish, English, and Gulf Arabic that if the passengers didn’t return to their seats he would most certainly return to Dubai. Then she appeared. Even Muhammad Atta at once conceded that here was the dark female in her most swinishly luxurious form: tall, longnecked, herself streamlined and aerodynamic, with hair like a billboard for a chocolate sundae, and all that flesh, damp and glowing as if from fever or lust. She came to a halt and gave a roll of the eyes that took her whole head with it; then she surged forward with great scooping motions of her hands, bellowing—“Vamos arriba, coños!” And the kneeling men had to peer out at this seraph of breast and haunch and uniformed power, and straighten up and scowl, and slowly grope for their seats. Muhammad Atta had felt only contempt for the men crooked over the patterned carpet; but he would never forget the face of the stewardess—the face of cloudless entitlement—and how badly he had wanted to hurt it.

  And yet—no, it wasn’t going to work. For him, the combination, up close, was wholly unmanageable: the combination of women and blood. So far, he thought, this is the worst day of my life—provably the worst day. In his head the weary fight between the vermin was finished; one was dying, and was now being disgustingly eaten by the other. And his loins, between them, were contriving for him something very close to the sensations of anal rape. So far, this was the worst day of his life. But then every day was the worst day, because every day was the most recent day, and the most developed, the most advanced (with all those other days behind it) toward the pan-anathema.

  The plane was flattening out. He waited for the order. This would be given by the captain, when he turned off the fasten-seat-belts sign.

  We have some planes, said Muhammad Atta, coolly. Just stay quiet, and you’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport. Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.

  He had stepped through the region of inexpressible sordor, and gained the cockpit. Here, in the grotto of the mad clocksmith, was more cringing flesh and more blood—but manageably male. Now he disengaged the computer and prepared to fly by direct law.

  It was 8:24. He laughed for the first time since childhood: he was in the Atlantic of the sky, at the controls of the biggest weapon in history.

  At 8:27 he made a grand counter-clockwise semicircle, turning south.

  At 8:44 he began his descent.

  The core reason was of course all the killing—all the putting to death. Not the crew, not the passengers, not the office workers in the Twin Towers, not the cleaners and the caterers, not the men of the NYPD and the FDNY. He was thinking of the war, the wars, the war-cycles that would flow from this day. He didn’t believe in the Devil, as an active force, but he did believe in death. Death, at certain times, stopped moving at its even pace and broke into a hungry, lumbering run. Here was the primordial secret. No longer closely guarded—no longer well kept. Killing was divine delight. And your suicide was just a part of the contribution you made—the massive contribution to death. All your frigidities and futilities were rewritten, becoming swollen with meaning. This was what was possible when you turned the tides of life around, when you ran with the beasts, when you flew with the flies.

  First, the lesser totems of Queens, like a line of defense for the tutelary godlings of the island.

  When he came clattering in over the struts and slats of Manhattan, there it was ahead of him and below him—the thing which is called World. Cross streets, blocks, districts, shot out from underneath the speedlines of the plane. He was glad that he wouldn’t have to plow down into the city, and he even felt love for it, all its strivings and couplings and sunderings. And he felt no impulse to increase power or to bank or to strike even lower. It was reeling him in. Now even the need to shit felt right and good as his destination surged toward him.

  There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. “The passengers died instantly.” Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was thirty-three. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporization; perhaps this was true even for the wall shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood.

  American 11 struck at 8:46:40. Muhammad Atta’s body was beyond all healing by 8:46:41; but his mind, his presence, needed time to shut itself down. The physical torment—a panic attack in every nerve, a riot of the atoms—merely italicized the last shinings of his brain. They weren’t thoughts; they were more like a series of unignorable conclusions, imposed from without. Here was the hereafter, after all; and here was the reckoning. His mind groaned and fumbled with an irreconcilability, a defeat, a self-cancellation. Could he assemble the argument? It follows—by definition—if and only if…

  And then the argument assembled all by itself. The joy of killing was proportional to the value of what was destroyed. But that value was something a killer could never see and never gauge. And where was the joy he thought he had felt—where was that joy, that itch, that paltry tingle? Yes, how gravely he had underestimated it. How very gravely he had underestimated life. His own he had hated, and had wished away; but see how long it was taking to absent itself—and with what helpless grief was he watching it go, imperturbable in its beauty and its power. Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.

  2

  On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m., in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began.

  APRIL 2006. The New Yorker

  Iran and the Lord of Time

  The American politician whom Mahmoud Ahmadinejad most closely resembles—in one crucial respect—is Ronald Reagan. General similarities, I agree, are hard to spot. Ahmadinejad doesn’t live on a ranch with a former starlet. As a young Republican, Reagan wasn’t involved in the murder of prominent Democrats. Ahmadinejad doesn’t use Grecian 2000. Reagan didn’t have a degree in traffic control. And so on. But what they have in common is this: both men are denizens of that stormlit plain where end-time theology meets nuclear weapons.

  Now we can return, for a while, to dissimilarities. Ahmadinejad is not checked and balanced by democratic institutions. Reagan did not actually spend public money on civic preparations for the Second Coming. Ahmadinejad does not have a temperament in which “simple-minded idealism” (this is Eric Hobsbawm’s account of the breakthrough with Gorbachev in Reykjavik) might break through the dense screen of “careerists, desperadoes and professional warriors around him” and recognize “the sinister absurdity” of the arms race. Reagan was not the product of a culture saturated in dreams of morbid torment, self-mutilation, and mass martyrdom. Finally, whereas Reagan had enough firepower to kill everybody on earth at least once over, Ahmadinejad does not yet have his bomb.

  Jesus Christ, according to both men, is due very shortly, but in Ahmadinejad’s vision Christ will merely be part of the entourage of a much grander personage—the Hidden Imam. Who is the Hidden Imam? In the year 873, the bloodline of the Prophet came to an end when Hasan al-Askari (in Shiism the eleventh legitimate imam) died without an heir. At that point, among the believers, a classic circularity took hold. It was assumed that Hasan must have an heir; there was no record of his existence, they reasoned, because extraordinary efforts had been made to conceal it; and extraordinary efforts had been made because this son was an extraordinary imam—the Mahdi, in fact, or the Lord of Time.

  In Shia eschatology the Mahdi returns during a period of great tribulation (during a nuclear war, for instance), delivers the faithful from injustice and oppression, and supervises the Day of Judgement. When that happens, the Muslims have won: the Shia have won. Not only Ahmadinejad but members of his cabinet are now giving the Hidden Imam “about four years”—in other words, within the current presidential term. And where has the Hidden Imam dwelt since the ninth century? In “occultation,” wherever that may be, as he counts off the days till his reappearance. Rightly is he called the Lord of Time: he is more than eleven hundred years old.

  Before we come to all the other reasons for not allowing Iran, under any circumstances, to develop nuclear weapons, let us take a brief, surrealistic look at the Iranian identity, which has two poles: Cyrus the Great and Muhammad, Persepolis and Qom—the imperially sensuous and the imperially pious. In 1935 Iranians found themselves living in a different country—not Persia but Iran, the specifically pre-Islamic “land of the Arians.” This was the work of the secularizer Reza Shah, Iran’s Atatürk or Nasser. In 1976 Iranians found themselves living in a different millennium—not 1355 (dated from the time of Muhammad), but 2535 (dated from the birth of Cyrus the Great). This was the work of Reza Shah’s son. Then came the Revolution. It is now called the Islamic Revolution, but it was not an Islamic revolution. It became Islamic when it was over, because the mullahs had a near-monopoly of violence, and could also field the charismatic glower of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

  After 1979, Iran was subjected to militant and breakneck re-Islamization. Pre-Muhammadan times were declared to be jahiliyyah, a benighted toilet of ignorance and idolatry, and a dire embarrassment to all good Muslims. In the mid-1990s, for example, the historian Jahangir Tafazoli was murdered simply because he was the best-known expert on ancient Iran. But you will recognize the indivisibility of the sensual and the pious in the Iranian character when I tell you that the author of this quietly beautiful quatrain—

  I am a supplicant for a goblet of wine

  from the hand of a sweetheart.

  In whom can I confide this secret of mine,

  Where can I take this sorrow?

  —is the Ayatollah Khomeini. As against that, to come full circle, this was the fate of Khomeini’s father: himself an ayatollah, Khomeini Sr. was murdered by a friend of a man who had been sentenced to death, by Khomeini Sr., for eating in daylight during Ramadan.

  Mystical, volatile, and masochistic, and so violent that a protest about bus fares can leave thirty dead, Iranians, one might cautiously suggest, are not yet ready for the force that drives the sun. Everyone knows what Ahmadinejad thinks of Israel (and we remember his Islamists’ conference, or his goons’ rodeo, in Tehran, on the historicity of the Holocaust). This is what Rafsanjani thinks of Israel—Rafsanjani, the old, much-jailed revolutionary chancer, a pragmatist and reformer, hugely worldly, hugely corrupt: “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything,” whereas a counterstrike on Iran will merely “harm” the Islamic world. “It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

  At first the calculation seems to resemble that of the Hindu fundamentalists who advocated nuclear war with Pakistan. And yet it is not just a question of weight of numbers. A better analogy would be with Bolshevism in its strictly Leninist phase: ideology is placed over nation. Iranians call the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) “the Imposed War.” In fact it was the Provoked War, which then became the Self-Perpetuating War, because Khomeini made it a test of Islam, with pan-Shiism as the stated goal. And it was for this that the little martyrs filed through the minefields and then sprinted into the machine-gun fire. In the West, we’re all supposed to feel terrible about having supported Saddam (allowing him to avoid outright defeat). But the far greater danger was an expansionist and triumphalist Khomeini.

  Rule number one: no theocracy can be allowed to wield a nuclear weapon. For the Iranians, as an Israeli official put it, Mutual Assured Destruction “is not a deterrent. It’s an incentive.” Indeed, the more you look into it, the more you wonder why we are having an illegitimate fiasco in Iraq when we could be having a legitimate fiasco in Iran. Yes, where was the President’s spell-check tsar? With Iran, we have a cornucopia of casus belli: strong links with al-Qaeda; known facilitation of September 11; and twenty years of vigorous nuclear weaponization, an epic of ring magnets and milling machines, of calutrons and cyclotrons, assisted by practically every country on earth except Israel. And there are dozens of others, like the unavenged U.S. marines of Beirut. With Iran, too, we have a population that is strongly if ambivalently pro-American. To the youth of Iran (a large majority), America is the Mahdi—the redeemer, the Lord of Time.